Tag Archives: Nostalgia

There’s magic in words, some of it black magic. Words can carry with them painful connotations derived and held onto from past experiences, like the name of the guy your high school sweetheart dumped you for, or the title of the song that was playing while she did it. Words and songs and phrases can transport you to another time and another age when the wounds were fresh, carrying with them the association of loss, of dashed hopes, of long-forgotten pains that float to the top when you hear them again.

For me, one of those phrases has been popping up a lot lately. It’s on the Facebook feed and in the newspapers and bandied about by news anchors as if it were some joyous thing to be celebrated, but I know better. I’ve been here before.

I wasn’t yet twelve years old at the time, though that milestone was approaching. Summer had been sweetened by an emerging appreciation of curls and curves and perfume scented breezes. The buzz of pre-pubescent ardor hummed a constant current through the days and nights.

I got where I needed to be on bicycle, usually with a mitt dangling from the handlebars. The truth is, there were few places I needed to be. There’s a freedom at that age that isn’t experienced again in life. From grass-cutting-job-days to nights at the neighborhood pool to little league games, it was summer with a capital ‘S’, free and easy and dusty and fun. I teetered there on the edge of boy and teen, those childish things not yet put away, but their days certainly numbered.

The summer of 1984 was a magic summer, complete with its own magic number.

From birth I was a Catholic, a Chicagoan, and a Cub Fan. Sitting here now at forty-three years old, eleven years doesn’t seem very long, but in 1984, eleven years was a lifetime. In that lifetime, I’d taken a lot of flack for being a Cub fan. Back then, the White Sox, those South Side Hitmen of the 70’s, the Winnin’ Ugly Division Champs of ’83, they were the city’s team. The Cubs were the team of old ladies in floppy hats and shirtless beer-guzzling men who could somehow get to the ballpark in the middle of the afternoon on a daily basis while everyone else was at work, the ones

Lee Elia & me Wrigley Field 1983

Lee Elia famously referred to the summer before as the “dumb fifteen motherf*ckin’ percent that come out to day baseball”.
My team had been the loveable losers, a dominant force during the first half of the twentieth century and near perennial basement dwellers throughout the second half.

There was the lore of that magical 1969 season passed down by elders who’d been alive to witness it. I’d heard the stories of Banks and Williams and Santo and Hundley and Jenkins. Of the unstoppable boys of summer. It was more a cautionary tale though than a fairy tale; something from the mind of the brothers Grimm rather than

Disney. Those unbeatable Cubbies took a headfirst downhill tumble late in the season. The ’69 Cubs not making the post-season was a nearly statistical impossibility and yet it had happened. They’d been on top of the world and then they fell and they fell hard and they lost and that’s when we, the collective we, started hating the Mets.

Prior to that magical and cursed year, there wasn’t much of which to brag until you counted backwards to 1945.

As Steve Goodman wrote in his song, “the law of averages says anything will happen that can, but the Cubs haven’t won a National League pennant since they year we dropped the bomb on Japan”. If eleven years is a lifetime, thirty-nine years was practically prehistoric. Hitler and Nazis for real not just in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Soviet Union was on our side, back before the Bridge Over the River Qui was a whistling tune, and back when Japan had an Emperor and would send Kamikaze pilots to crash into American warships, before they were our source for Sony TV’s and Donkey Kong. Not only had my parents not yet been born, but my grandparents were still young enough to have natural hair color and their own teeth! That may as well have been three days after the crucifixion of Christ as far as I was concerned.

But these were the color television, MTV, Cold War days of 1984. Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones were in the movies, Van Halen was on the radio, and about two-thirds of my wardrobe consisted of Cubs free giveaway t-shirts – Cub emblem on the front, some form of Vienna Beef ad on the back or better yet, a bold announcement declaring the shirt was courtesy of Old Style beer. I went nowhere without my dingy, sweat-stained, plastic-snap adjustable Cubs cap on my head. At the time I was going for an all-American-leave-it-to-beaver-Bad-News-Bears kind of look. Sadly, what I had was more of a Eugene-from-Grease-when-he-was-on-Punky-Brewster kind of look. In any event, the Cubs were on top, and for the first time in my short life, it was cool to be a Cub fan.

Hall of Fame broadcaster Harry Caray & Me 1985

Actor Eddie Deezen (Eugene in Grease & Eddie on Punky Brewster) here with George Gaynes. See the similarity?

By September, the bandwagon was overflowing. Lakeview was hopping and day-baseball was all the rage. Ryne Sandberg was the star of the show while Harry Caray sang the praises of Jody-Jody Davis to the tune of Davy Crockett, Leon ‘The Bull’ Durham covered first and swung one heck of a bat, while veterans Ron ‘the Penguin’ Cey, and Larry Bowa rounded out the animal infield. And on the mound, dominating baseball was the Red Barron himself, Rick Sutcliffe. No more were ‘we’ the loveable losers. No more were we just old ladies in floppy hats and unemployed drunks. Nope, the Cubs were on top and the nation was watching. Suddenly Cub fans came out of the woodwork. Everyone from Hollywood superstars to President Reagan came out of the closet with their hidden Cub fandom. Lakeview became Wrigleyville, the Cubs became America’s team, and Sox fans became quiet and bitter.

That’s when I learned about the magic number, what it meant and how it worked. ‘Magic Number’, that’s the phrase, the one that’s been bandied about so much as of late. That summer, when I’d first learned of it, it was the Mets and the Cubs again. I followed the magic number as it dwindled. Those Mets weren’t going to get ‘em this time around. And on a September night, 3 months before my family owned our first VCR, my Cubbies clinched the NL Eastern Division and a spot in the post-season for the first time since “we dropped the bomb on Japan”. It wasn’t the National League pennant, but it was something special, and the way the Cubs were playing,
1984 was going to be the year Chicago got to the World Series again. Even the other side of town hadn’t been there since ’59. The doldrums were over. The skies had cleared. The curse had been lifted. The streams had been crossed and Gozer the Traveler had been sent packing. The sun shone over Wrigley Field once more. A wide-eyed romance with fall baseball bloomed in a little boy too naïve to know to be wary of romance and its many pitfalls. They would win. It was almost certain. Everyone said so. They were magic.

October baseball at Wrigley Field! First game – win at home!!!
Second game – win at home!!! One to go and it was on to the Series. No bombs this year and the world would watch on their Japanese TV’s.

And, just like in ’45, it was shaping up to be a battle against the Tigers. In fact, in 1908, the last time the Cubs had won the World Series it was against the Detroit Tigers. The Cubs had faced the Tigers 4 times in their 10 visits to the World Series, twice beating them and twice losing to them. It was clearly a matter of destiny.

And then it happened. Reality struck and it struck hard delivering a blow that would knock the breath from young lungs. San Diego took three in a row and the newspapers declared the magic number to be 1985. Which of course it wasn’t. They went back in ’89, again in ’98, ’03, ‘07 and ’08. But none were as magical as that 1984 season, even the dreaded ‘Bartman year’ of ’03 when they weren’t just one game away, but only five outs away from heading to that elusive World Series. 39 years had become 58 years, and yet somehow 1984 was better, more exciting. One could argue it was my age. At 11 years old, everything is more exciting, but that’s only a part of it.

What had changed by ’03 was that it wasn’t my first time around this block. I was a virgin no longer. I’d been in love and had had my heart broken, more than once. I’d tasted the bitterness of love that rises when the sweetness dissolves. I’d been pushed aside by one who was supposed to be destiny. When wounds heal, the scar tissue toughens the once tender heart.

That night, the night of the Bartman game, I was standing in the beer garden of the Piano Man bar at Clark and Grace, about a block north of Wrigley Field, watching the game with co-workers. It was the seventh inning and the Cubs were up 3-0. My friend, a woman from Michigan who was new to this Cubs thing, turned to me and said, “I thought you’d be more excited. Why aren’t you excited? They’re winning.” I replied, “Because I’ve been here before. It’s still too early to get excited.” At the end of the 7th, we made our way south to Waveland and Clark where the beer gardens of Bernie’s tavern and whatever bar was on the opposite corner that year had merged as spectators jammed Waveland Avenue to catch a glimpse of one of the nearby TV’s and hear the roar of the crowd from the ballpark behind us.

Again, the air was electric. I cracked open that door of hope just enough to let a sliver of light in. It was pretty late in the game now. Was it too early still? Top of the 8th, three run lead, one out. Maybe this time was different.

In his defense, he wasn’t the only one to reach for the ball, he was just the unlucky one to touch it.

Then, from high above, someone with a giant vacuum sucked all the air out of the neighborhood. Bernie’s was silent. The other bar was silent. Waveland Avenue was silent and that ballpark, spilling over with fans, was silent. It unfolded slowly and painfully. Eight runs later and I knew we were done, not just for the game, but also for the year. There was still another chance, a game seven, but you could feel it, a tangible thing – loss. Again.

She’d done it to me again. She keeps breaking my heart, but I can’t let her go.

What do you say about a guy who keeps going back to the same woman expecting different results only to have her crush him time and again? Hopeless romantic or simple idiot? Optimist or Fool? I don’t know. She’s done it to me before. But maybe this time will be different. This time she really does love me. This time we’re going to make it, we’re going to be happy, I just know it. It’s not like it was before; she’s changed. Happy day!

Yeah, they’re good. Best team in all of baseball and have been since April. Dominant pitching, a lights-out closer, and bat after bat after bat that you just can’t pitch around. If Bryant don’t get you, Rizzo will, and almost assuredly with Fowler on base.

And so, as the magic number dwindles down to zero, I will venture into this post-season in much the same way I venture into any romantic relationship – with trepidation, cautious optimism, and a nagging sense of impending doom.

But really, this time is different. She’s come back to me, and she’s changed. Really, we’re going to be happy this time.

It seems I have reached the age at which my contemporaries have taken up the re-writing of history to suit their current mindset and have begun to bemoan the current generation of young people for their clothing, their music and their morals. Memories, it seems, are selective at best.

Case in point, I have seen memes lately stating things along the lines of: “when I was a kid, we were out playing with each other, not texting or facebooking.” True, because it didn’t exist, but now that it does, what are you doing? Jumping on Facebook, Pinterest, texts, e-mails, etc. to say how shitty kids are today for paying so much attention to Facebook, Pinterest, texts, e-mails, etc. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m as guilty of abusing social media as anybody. Hell my hobby is to write long diatribes to friends and strangers detailing my thoughts for the week. How self-absorbed and introverted/extroverted can you get? But I digress. Let’s get back to you and your haughtiness towards today’s youth shall we?

Think about it. Our parents could say the same thing about us. “You know, when I was forty, if we wanted face-time with someone we went to their house and talked to them! We had one phone, and we kept the line open in case there was an emergency. If we wanted to chat with a friend we went down to the tavern and met them, we didn’t sit alone typing to them- those were called letters and when you got one of those it usually meant someone had died or you’d been drafted. And if you wanted to see a naked woman you had to pay a nickel to sit in a filthy little room with sticky floors and… wait, there’s porn on the Internet?”

But that’s just the beginning of this trend I’ve noticed in my own generation. First off, for those of you with short term memories, before you lash out at kids today for playing their PS 4 instead of going to the park, think about how often you sat in front of your Atari 2600 avoiding scorpions and campfires with your Pitfall guy.

Actually, if I remember correctly, our parents’ generation did say the same thing about us. There were news reports about the lost generation and our addiction to video games and the arcade. Boston even prohibited the licensing of arcade games in residential areas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F70EXLwqQHk. Remember the flack we took for all hanging around the Ms. Pac-Man and Q-Bert and Jungle Hunt machines? “Why don’t you kids go out and play?”

But it goes beyond how they spend their time. Today’s youth are criticized for their exposure to sex and violence. First off, who allows this? We do. But before we decry that Miley Cyrus licking a wrecking ball is poisoning their fragile little minds, let’s not forget that Madonna was singing about being touched for the very first time Like a Virgin and Cyndi Lauper was practically going blind a she She Bopped, and name one Prince song that isn’t about that little androgynous weirdo getting laid. And they all played on a constant cycle on B-96 and MTV. Let us also not forget that before there was PG-13, nudity and swearing were allowed in PG movies. Don’t believe me? Watch an uncensored version of Airplane and notice while the naked boobs go bouncing by that it’s rated PG. The Man With Two Brains opens on a tracking shot of a woman’s bare breast. Yep, big tit in the middle of the screen – also rated PG. (Learned that the hard way when I went to watch it with my 7-year-old son) Most of the movies directed at us seemed to assume we’d all already ‘done it’ (which when you’re a dorky kid with thick glasses gives you a pretty skewed view of reality, when you think you’re the only one who hasn’t and isn’t really even sure how). Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, National Lampoons Vacation and Caddy Shack, all of my favorites, all featuring kids having sex and doing drugs. And we turned out all right, right? Again, I digress. Don’t even get me started on Blame It On Rio.

Best friends fall in love with each other’s teenage daughter. (1984) In 2016, it would be called, ‘See Ya In Prison Fellow Pedophile’

It seems to be a right of passage though. Just as tossing aside the values of your parents’ generation, criticizing the mores and work ethic of the new generation must be a part of the human experience. As I pointed out above, we aren’t the first. Our parents, the Baby-Boomers, they weren’t sure where we were heading. We didn’t have the social-consciousness, the work ethic, didn’t know the meaning of sacrifice.

Ironic behavior for a generation that found itself virtually, and literally, at war with its preceding generations. But they reached that age, that age when what they knew had changed into something from the past and the world had moved on. Mutton chops and cut-off denim shorts and tie-dye shirts were out. Neon stretch pants, oversized sweatshirts and oversized earrings and oversized everything else, and turned-up collared shirts on preppy, label-conscious kids, or black lipstick and nail polish on the misfits from Tom Petty’s Zombie Zoo (Petty’s take on 80’s Goth, he’s a baby boomer btw) were the in-things. No more acoustic singer-songwriters. We had synthesizers and computerized music for the computer age. The future was ‘now’ and Max Headroom was the proof. Michael Jackson and Madonna competed to see who could grab their crotch the most in one song.

The space-age wonderment of the 1970’s erupted in a ball of flame and showered its ashes all over Florida in 1986. We lived in constant fear of the Nuke and the Day After. Live for now because there might not be another tomorrow. The cold war, the Iron Curtain, and in a heartbeat Ayds went from being a diet pill to AIDS, the disease that will kill you for having sex. Oh shit, just as I’m about to start dating. And according to John Hughes, all these girls have been around before. I hope I don’t get AIDS and die because I made-out with a slut while I had a canker sore in my mouth.

In my circle of friends, we didn’t smoke pot or do coke, although coke was the drug of choice for those about 5-10 years older than us. But we drank. We drank like, well, like our grandparents. Remember, things skip a generation. There were gang shootings, unrest in the Middle East, the constant threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and AIDS, don’t forget AIDS. Drink up boys. I’d say half of my generation used some form of tobacco – either cigarettes or chew. And there were still those who smoked pot – burnouts we called them.

Minus the cell phones and the texting and snapchatting, my bet is, if you were to turn invisible and follow around a group of high schoolers now, they wouldn’t be much different than we were at that age.

I don’t know what it is that makes us lash out at the upcoming group, but it happens to every generation. Take for example this quote about the lazy, privileged generation:

The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …

Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannized over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.

Kenneth John Freeman wrote that in 1907. He was describing the attitudes of ancient Romans to the upcoming generation.

It is eternal. Don’t believe me? Watch an Andy Hardy movie from the ‘30’s or 40’s. The teenybopper flicks of the day. There is an obvious generational divide that spurs the comedy of those very popular pictures that made Mickey Rooney a star. Yeah, Mickey Rooney, the Justin Beiber of his time, well maybe not quite Beiber, maybe more like the Justin Long if Justin Long looked more like Patton Oswald. Still not a great analogy, but you get it, he was in a lot of movies.

What I’m trying to say is, this is nothing new. We like to remember the good old days as having been good, but they weren’t. Why can’t we go back to the way things were when I was a kid? Nuclear threats? AIDS? Howard the Duck? Our parents thought in those difficult times, ‘why can’t we go back to when I was a kid?’ The beginning of the cold war, Korea, Viet Nam, civil unrest, riots, racial inequality, the civil rights movement and separate drinking fountains in the south?

And the previous generation… why can’t we go back to when… the world was at war? Hitler was very close to taking over the world while he slaughter 2 million people and Americans fought and died on two fronts? When every family on the block had at least one, if not more, loved one overseas in harms way and the fate of the world rested in the hands of elected old men and the young men willing to lay down their lives for the rest of us?

And before them, the Great Depression? The Dust Bowl? Prohibition? Gangland violence in the streets?

And before that, the World at War. Chemical warfare, gas masks, air assaults for the first time in human history.

We can go back and back and back and find the same thing. The world is shit. Been that way forever. Will be that way forever. But as kids we don’t see it. We only know what we’ve always known and the rest is a new experience given to us by those in charge at the time mingled with our imagination of what it could be. We tend to look back on those days through rose-colored glasses because, though times were bad for the world in general, we were just kids. We were busy discovering ourselves and each other and freedom bit-by-bit, friends, and bugs, and worms, and love, and ‘like’, and lust, and infatuation, and music, and movies, and tastes of our own in those things and food and drink and we tested the limits and we had fun and we had some responsibility but not much and that made those times so much better than today… And that’s the point.

Today isn’t worse than yesterday, it’s just that we’re in a different place now than we were then and that place just isn’t as good as the place we were in yesterday when everything was new and regrets were few and opportunities were something that hadn’t even presented themselves yet and anything was possible and how it is at that age must be how it’s always been. But that’s not how it is now. That’s what’s changed – our perspective, our place in the world – more than anything else, that’s what’s changed. And it’s not so nice. So we look back and we remember things differently than they really were. But not entirely because a lot of what we criticize these young kids about, are those things we look back on in our moments of honest reflection and regret. “Don’t waste your time in front of the TV” is really “Don’t waste as much time in front of the TV as I did because if I could trade places with you or go back I would in a heartbeat and I’d eat it all up, I wouldn’t waste a second watching Alf.”

So cut the kids some slack. As Billy Joel said in 1983, “the good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems”.

They’ll learn. One day they’ll be forty and they’ll be telling their kids how wonderful things were in the twenty-teens, when life was so much better.

And to think, you wasted these good old days wishing you were sometime else.

Andy Hardy: The next ten years of my life are the best.Judge Hardy: The next ten years of anybody’s life are the best.

P.S. To support my thoughts, here are some quotes about teens and generation gaps from throughout the years. Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same:

“Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can’t understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation’s clothes and hair suddenly retro.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do now. ~Will Rogers

“Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!” ― Agatha Christie, Murder on the Links 1923

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From the new novel, In The Sanctity of Revenge available now on Amazon:

Mrs. Kelly awoke Christmas Eve morning to WGN radio on her alarm clock. She shuffled to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Sitting alone at the kitchen table, she remembered Christmas Eves past. She could recall the children bouncing off the walls almost as soon as they got out of bed waiting for night to come so they could go back to bed and get up for Christmas morning. She remembered Harold getting up, grumbling his way through the morning’s first two cups of coffee and first three or four cigarettes. Then he’d announce to the kids that it was time to get dressed. The kids would immediately rush upstairs to their bedrooms and change out of their pajamas and into the day’s clothing.

Once dressed and back downstairs they would tug at Harold’s arm begging to head out to the stores for the day. It was their annual tradition. Harold thought it important to include the children in the shopping for their mother’s Christmas presents since it was they who benefitted most from her hard work and sacrifice.

He’d finish off his coffee and take a last drag from his cigarette, then he’d head off to the bedroom to get dressed in his cleanest white t-shirt and a pair of brown polyester pants for a day at the department stores. He’d take the kids to Sears and they would shop for dresses and slacks and scarfs for their mother. Mrs. Kelly didn’t know it, but Harold saved a few bucks a week all year long for her Christmas present. Whereas Jack shopped on Christmas Eve because he liked the fun of the spontaneity of it, Harold Kelly shopped on Christmas Eve because that was when he finally had saved enough money to give his wife a proper Christmas. Along with his yearlong savings, each child contributed a little from his/her allowance. Money that, upon their father’s orders, they were supposed to have been saving for their mother’s Christmas since August.

From there, they would take the bus to the Ideal Pastry bakery where they would buy their mother her favorite cookies and donuts, plus a cookie for each kid. After that, he’d take them to the Irish Imports Shop, where they would usually purchase a record of Irish songs like the ones Mrs. Kelly’s parents would sing when she was a child.

Her folks had both been born in Ireland and met here in the States. While little Irene was growing up, her parents would play songs from the homeland and dance around the front room of their one-bedroom apartment with their little girl. Mrs. Kelly didn’t know what happened to those records after her parents died, but every Christmas Harold would surprise her with a record album of the songs of her youth.

Harold was a stickler for tradition, and so, there was never an artificial tree in the Kelly residence, and there was no tree in the Kelly residence until Christmas Eve. So after the Irish Imports shop, it was straight to the C-Davis Truck Rental lot, where the trucks had been temporarily replaced by Christmas Trees, to choose the perfect tree for the Kelly family Christmas. Mrs. Kelly often wondered if it was truly tradition motivating her husband to shop for trees on Christmas Eve or if it was the fact that he could haggle the salesman down so easily at such a late date. The pickings were scarcer, but you couldn’t beat the price and he always managed to bring home a tree that, once decorated at least, would be brilliant.

She smiled a bitter-sweet smile as she conjured up the vision of her husband dragging a six foot tall Christmas tree onto a city bus with children in tow dragging shopping bags from Sears and the Irish Imports, bumping into other riders, needles flying and falling off the tree throughout the bus, bags and packages bumping against knees and seats. It was no wonder she never got a porcelain tea set or Waterford crystal for Christmas, it never would’ve survived the journey.

Once home, the children would run the shopping bags up to their rooms where they’d wrap them while Harold took the tree and a hacksaw to the yard and sawed off the bottom few inches. She could see him in her mind’s eye out there in the dark snowy yard in his work boots, polyester pants and plaid winter coat sawing off those few inches of tree trunk so that the fresh cut could soak up enough water to make the tree last until the Feast of the Epiphany when it would finally be taken down and the Christmas Season would officially end.

Next came the annual hour of Harold lighting the tree, mumbling words not appropriate for such a sacred Holiday, as he fought with tangles and burned out bulbs and flashing strands that had never flashed before.

Then, with the tree firmly placed in its stand and fully lit, Harold sipping from a fresh brewed cup of coffee (with a three count splash of Jameson), and enjoying a well-earned cigarette after a long day of children, store-clerks, crowds, tree salesmen, and those goddamn Christmas lights. Then Mother was presented with one record from the Irish Imports (the others to be saved for the morning). The sounds of the Emerald Isle would play on the phonograph as the children decorated the tree with the family ornaments Mrs. Kelly had brought up from the basement while they were out shopping.

With the kids in bed, the stockings stuffed, and the presents beneath the tree, Harold and Irene Kelly would slip off to bed where it was time for another Christmas Eve tradition. Both of them bursting with love – love for their family, love for their blessings, love for their Savior, and love for each other – they would nestle in beneath the covers, legs rubbing the other’s to produce some warmth, arms wrapped around the other, bodies pressed together, they would embrace and envelope each other in a physical love that only years of marriage can invoke. That well practiced tradition complete, they would both settle in to drift off into a solid slumber.

In The Sanctity of Revenge can be purchased at Amazon. If you buy a paperback, you get a free Kindle version.

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I took a slow drive past the old Stevenson Arms dorm today. Homecoming weekend has been fun, but it’s almost time to head back into the present time. As Tom Petty says, ‘you can look back babe, but it’s best not to stare’. So before I jump in that time machine that brought me back here, I want to reflect a little on life and the time I spent here and the dash of time between then and now.

Homecoming Football game 2011

The first feeling that struck me as I rolled past the backend of the dorm building (which by the way hasn’t changed at all from that perspective, sans the blue instead of maroon door) was what a short time in our lives it was. Though it was a constant stream of students, a teaming bubbling flow of life, it was also a constant shifting of individuals, To a casual observer looking in from outside, that river never changed, but for those of us riding that wave we saw changes.

For me, I was a part of that current for three years. And in that short amount of time, both the dorm and I changed immensely. It was not the same place I had first moved into in the fall of 1990, but I wasn’t the same person anymore either. It’s that time of life. Lots of changes, and they are big ones. In childhood, because you’re growing physically as well as mentally and emotionally, it’s easy to see and expect those big changes, but by seventeen, they kind of take you by surprise, sweep you up and carry you to a new place swiftly and not always smoothly, but almost imperceptibly. I think that’s part of why this place is so dear to me. I did so much growing and learning and becoming who I am there. That’s where my adulthood started, though ‘adult’ might not be the most accurate word I can use to describe what I’ve become, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.

The part that is so difficult to grasp and completely understand is the randomness of chance and coincidence that conspired to bring me what has essentially turned out to be, simply put, my life. I hadn’t planned on attending S.I.U., but once it was decided (three weeks before school began), the dorms were all full. There was one dorm with room. Most years, this was one of the more difficult dorms to get into, freshman/sophomore approved, but off-campus and co-ed floors. Due to a computer malfunction that year, rooms that were normally booked were available. I got in.

I knew almost nobody in Carbondale. The one or two people I did know were older and lived in apartments and townhouses off campus and I really didn’t know them that well. Again chance stepped in and the lady who ran the dorm assigned me to room with the only other seventeen-year-old male in the building. He spent all of five months as my roommate and the last twenty-one years as one of my closest friends.

The old Stevenson Arms 2014

That fall was the first year the University closed the campus and dorms for a week over Halloween and we were sent home. Mike was from Las Vegas, so I brought him to Chicago to stay with my family for the week. There he met his future bride and mother of his children and forged life-long friendships of his own in what I’m sure for him was a most unexpected place.

You see what I mean about the randomness of the whole thing. Fate, God, Luck, Chance, a random roll of the dice brought certain people to this one certain place in this one precise moment in time and set us on a path from which we could never again veer off. That is life, isn’t it? And because of those random chance encounters and unconscious decisions it is what I call ‘My Life’.

I think of the people I met here. Some friendships are the enduring kind, others are people I’ll probably never see again on this Earthly journey, but all of them are with me in that strange, hard-to-describe way. Avion with whom I was a student janitor for two or three months and with whom I went to the shooting range once is still vivid in my memory in a way in which I almost expect to run into him around campus one day when school resumes and neither of us will have changed. The mind plays tricks on you that way as the universe secretly steals time away from you.

Then there are the friends who I talk to every few years or so. Thanks to Facebook we can keep up more often without too much hassle. They are those kinds of friends who, even after ten years of not being in the same room together, after about five minutes it’s as if nothing has changed… as if life hasn’t moved much. Of course it has. It’s the connection, the shared experience of that crucial time in our lives that stays cemented and allows those friendships to pick up where they left off.

And then there are the others. The ones I haven’t seen or spoken to in the better part of sixteen years or more. They are here with me. A part of who I am. I know, it sounds like I’m talking about dead people, but I’m not… at least I hope I’m not. They’re here, somewhere on the Earth following their own path, living out their personal journey one moment to the next somewhere, but I imagine this invisible tether, one we cannot feel nor see. We came from different stations into this one hub for a short time and affected each other, and then like locomotives in the night each branched off in our own direction, each on a separate journey to that final destination that lies, with any luck, in the much distant future. But that tether is there. It’s in a song, a smell, a feeling on the breeze that takes you back for just a fleeting second to that shared place and those people who made it special to you.

And so, here I sit on the edge of Thompson Woods, twenty-one years and two months after I first ventured to this place. I’m waiting for the Student Center to open so I can use the washroom and get a Starbucks for my long ride. The woods here on campus was always a place of reflection for me… a calm, serene escape from homesickness, classroom stress, worry and longing for my girlfriend hundreds of miles away. A venture off the beaten path even if just for a few minutes walking from one class to the next, taking the wooded trail through Thompson instead of across the campus was a respite, a rejuvenation of mind and spirit between lecture halls and lab hours. Much needed because, of course, not all the time I spent here was good. I know I’m looking back at it more romantically than realistically, but isn’t that what the past should be… at least sometimes?

From a more recent trip 2014

I’m grateful to have this place to visit. I’m grateful to have had the chance to visit this place with Mike again, and with his daughter and her friends. It’s kind of like being suspended between two places in time. But the thing about this journey we’re on is: the changes keep coming. They should keep coming. I feel I have just recently awoken from a decades long sleep… a fear induced walking comatose state. I’m awake now, and for the first time in a very, very long time I feel alive, and new, and ready to tackle those things I had previously allowed fear to keep from me. No more. So many lost moments and so many lost opportunities to become the ‘me’ I always wished I were. I feel a little like Dorothy coming to the realization that I had the power to get what I’ve wanted the entire time. Maybe I had to go through it all to get to this place, but I’m glad I’m finally here. So in a way, today as I leave S.I.U. again, I do so to face an uncertain but wide-open future of possibilities, but this time I’ll do it awake. And as I do, I take with me this place, this place that has given me enduring friendships, chance encounters that touched and changed my heart, and some of the most precious memories of my life… we are all tethered together by that force of nature that by chance brought us together and gave us this invisible link that lies within us and that force that set us on our way.

I thank God for that randomness of chance. It is the unplanned and unexpected moments of my life that have changed it and shaped it the most. Go ahead, keep making your plans, just don’t fight the current.

At 41 years old, I still get a thrill when I wind through the dimly lit, chill of the ancient concourse and ascend the concrete stairs to emerge in the warm sunlight, welcomed by blue skies, green grass, red brick and emerald ivy. The majestic scoreboard perched atop the center field bleachers towers over the cathedral, keeping watch like the bridge of a sailing ship about to take us for a voyage where time dissolves and timelessness envelopes me along with the smell of fresh peanuts and stale beer. I can’t help but smile. I am at once 41, 24, 16, 10, and 4 years old. I have grown up with her, and over the past few decades, we’ve both changed some, but at heart, we are both the same – for now.

My dad would take me to games when I was small. It was the late 1970’s. He worked security there and, with a single bleacher ticket for me, he would escort me to the far left corner of the back row of the right field bleachers and sit me there. If I needed anything, I was to see the women who ran the concession stand directly behind me. (They usually slipped me free gum – Wrigley’s of course) I sat there alone, surrounded by the Bleacher Bums, the ones Lee Elia would lash out at a couple of years later. Dad would check on me and bring me a pop and a hot dog. I was in heaven. Wrigley Field would become my favorite place to go.

After a few years, I was grouped with other boys and released into the upper deck, where there were plenty of empty seats. We yelled, we booed, we undoubtedly annoyed anyone near us, and we had a blast.

Soon I was able to hop the bus and buy my own ticket with grass cutting money. Big Gulps and hot dogs were cheaper at 7-11, so my friend and I would stop there, load up, and find a slab riser in center field to claim as our own. We’d stretch out and take in the game. I got my first whiff of marijuana sitting there.

At 16, I got my first real job there.

She’s seen me from boyhood, through my teens, into adulthood, and eventually fatherhood. I have made friends, found romance, learned how the real world works, how the Chicago-way works, been thrilled and had my heart broken in and around that ballpark, and have shared its joy with each of my three kids. Wrigley Field has been special to me. It is with a heavy-heart that I now must say farewell to that grand old lady. She’s not being torn down, but the changes that will made this off-season is enough to alter the very soul of her in a way that I’m afraid will never be undone.

Time marches on they tell me and the only constant is change. Well that’s what’s made her so special, even with superficial changes over the years, they’ve never quite dissolved her charm and timelessness. This time, we aren’t so lucky

They’re putting a jumbotron in her. Why not some Groucho glasses on the Mona Lisa as well? They claim it is the only way the Cubs and their loyal fans will ever see a World Series. I say their bologna has a first name and it’s J-U-M-B-O. Here’s why…

I would take the Congress-Douglas from Jeff Park to Addison then transfer to the 151 Addison bus. The Congress-Douglas line is now known as the Blue Line and it originates, or terminates however you wish to view it, at O’Hare Airport. Travelers flying into O’Hare can ride the rails into the neighborhoods and downtown. One day on my way to work, I got off the ‘L’ and walked across to the bus stop when a man approached me. “How do I get back to O’Hare?” he asked. “You get back on the same train you just got off of but going in the opposite direction,” I told him. Seemed logical and obvious to me. “I just flew in from San Francisco,” he went on to say which explained why the logical and obvious evaded him. “I flew in to see Wrigley Field and I’m flying right back out again after the game.” Think about that for a second. He didn’t fly from California to Chicago because he’s a Cub fan, or to see a great ballgame. The Cubs were not playing the Giants that day either so it wasn’t to see his team play. He “flew in to see Wrigley Field”. Those were his exact words. How many people do you think have flown across the country to see Miller Park or Camden Yards or U.S. Cellular Field? Few I’m sure. Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, old Tigers Stadium, and Wrigley Field. That’s about it.

I know, I know. Yankee Stadium has been rebuilt, Tiger Stadium is no more, and yes Fenway has a Jumbo-Tron and has for a while. And that only bolsters my point. Even those other iconic ballparks aren’t what they once were, what baseball once was. That makes Wrigley Field that much more unique.

People have flocked to Wrigley Field to see a baseball game for the past two decades because it’s Wrigley Field. Because it is a bridge to the past, a link from son to father to grandfather to great-grandfather. To experience Wrigley Field is to catch a glimpse of what previous generations experienced when going to a game. It’s not a stadium, it’s not complex, it’s a ballpark. It looks like a ballpark, it sounds like a ballpark, it smells like a ballpark, but most importantly it feels like a ballpark.

It is listed among Frank Lloyd Wright houses as must-sees when visiting the city. On any given afternoon, even in the dead of winter, you will see someone standing at the corner of Clark and Addison snapping pictures of Wrigley Field. They aren’t doing that at the United Center. They aren’t doing that at Soldier Field (and they weren’t even before the spacecraft landed in it). They aren’t doing that at the Cell. And they aren’t doing it at Wrigley Field because they’re Cub fans. At least not all of them.

If the ballpark has been the draw more so than the team that plays there, how does it follow that to have a good team play there, you have to change the ballpark?

The reality is though, they’re going to go ahead with the plans. They’re going to turn the area around Wrigley Field, commonly known as Wrigleyville (a term I have hated since the yuppies deemed it so in the late 1980’s) into a mall. They will take away that neighborhood feel that exists outside the ballpark and inside they will remove that link, that bridge to the past. Wrigley Field will, starting next season, be just another baseball stadium. It will be indistinguishable to Camden Yards or Citi Field or Busch Stadium. Bricks and ivy will still be on the outfield wall, sure, but that is already starting to look more like a replication than an original. The hand-operated scoreboard will still sit in center field, but it will lose its majesty, after being dwarfed by the big screen TV in left field.

It’s been a slow death. It started in 1988 with the necessary addition of lights. I was against it at the time, but I will admit I had an awful lot of fun nights at Wrigley Field, some I can remember, others I cannot.

That first season I worked there was the first full season with night games. As I rolled empty beer kegs down the upper deck ramps, the saxophone player serenaded from the sidewalk below and the city was alive, a living breathing thing, and that bridge opened up. Close your eyes, breath in deep, and listen. It could be 1989 or it could be 1945. Not much different than it would have been like had Mr. Wrigley installed the lights he’d sacrificed for the war effort. And so, I accepted them.

Then came the skyboxes and that ugly freaking press box in the upper deck behind home plate. The Tribune Company couldn’t have designed a more out of place looking addition to the park if they had hired a blind monkey with a seizure disorder to draw up the plans. The skyboxes themselves though, fit in nicely; hanging where the old press box used to be.

In the following years, little changes here and there occurred, but nothing outrageous. I’m not unrealistic about change. Change has been necessary over the years. Change is why Wrigley Field is still here for us to enjoy after 100 years of existence. If money hadn’t been spent and renovations been done over the years, it would’ve been knocked down long ago. But there is a way to make changes, to update the park while remaining true to the structure.

Do the Cubs need a new clubhouse? Definitely. Is there desperate need for more restrooms? By God YES! Should they include some advertising in the park? By all means, yes. It’s been done before, and if done well, could be made to fit in while still standing out. Do they need a new, larger press box? Indeed, fix what was never right to begin with. But do they need a Jumbo-Tron? Absolutely not.

There are necessary changes that can be done while retaining the charm and the heart of the place. And then there is that awfulness. A giant flashing light-show on a flatscreen. The death knell. The nail in the coffin of baseball’s last vestige of a time gone-by. The bridge to baseball’s hey-day (or Hey Hey day if I may) will be closed. No orange cones and barricades, just a big flashing sign that says, “Guess which virtual running hot dog will win the race.” Because, according to the ownership, this is what has kept us from winning a World Series, no Big-Screen hot dog races between innings.

We didn’t have one in 1984 when we came so close. Nor in 1989, 1998, 2003, 2008. We’ve had more opportunities in this modern age with this ballpark than in the 39 years between 1945 and 1984. We’ve come close. Have had good teams. Have been in contention. Have had the talent. Someone has to lose; unfortunately that someone has been the Cubs. It was not for a lack of spending money though. Money was spent and revenue came in without a Jumbo-Tron. I know, this family doesn’t have the resources the Tribune Company had, nor is it as wealthy as the Wrigley family was. But is the answer to destroy your most valuable asset?

Ballplayers come and go, and no team ever really has a dynasty. The Yankees didn’t make the playoffs last year despite all the money they bring in and put out. The closest team to dynasty status is the St. Louis Cardinals, a small market team whose spending, according to CBSsports.com, was less in 2013 than nine other teams including the White Sox, Red Sox, Phillies, and Toronto. As of September 23, 2014, Boston and Philadelphia are last in their respective divisions, while the White Sox are below .500 and in fourth place, and the Blue Jays two games above .500, third in their division. In 2014, the Cardinals spent less than twelve other teams including the Texas Rangers who are dead last in their division, the Arizona Diamondbacks who are dead last in their division, and the Cincinnati Reds who are only 3.5 games ahead of the Cubs in the NL Central. Spending big doesn’t always result in winning as we have so brutally learned over the years.

In 2009 and 2010, the Cubs spent more on salaries than every team in baseball except the Yankees and the Red Sox. They finished ’09 second in their division, but with a very average record of .516 and couldn’t secure a playoff spot. The results in 2010 were dismal. They finished fifth in their division with a .463 average, but drew over 3 million fans, 7th in all of baseball, ahead of Texas, Tampa, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Atlanta, all playoff teams that season. So what did the Cubs have that those teams didn’t? Wrigley Field. Many of those 3 million were there to see baseball at Wrigley Field, to cross that bridge to baseball past. To soak up the history, the tradition, the endangered aura that exists nowhere else but there, in that cathedral.

It seems to me the key to winning is more about spending wisely than spending big. The Cubs have been doing that in recent years with young acquisitions and the development of their farm system. Gone are the days of dropping millions on the Milton Bradleys of the game. It also seems to me that to make it through the lean years between good teams, it’s nice to have something besides the product on the field to bring in revenue. The Cubs have that in Wrigley Field. It draws fans even when the team stinks. When there is no star slugger whose jerseys fans clamor to buy, you still have merchandise (t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, hats, signs, flags, posters, postcards) featuring the star that never leaves, never retires, never gets injured, and never corks a bat – Wrigley Field. As evidenced this past season when the major attention and marketing was given to her 100th Anniversary as there was very little to market on the field. She not only bridges past to present, but present to future by alone bringing in revenue while the team rebuilds the roster. With the right custodians, she’ll continue to do so for several years to come.

This is not the right custodian. He doesn’t get it. He is not a Chicagoan. He found the team when all the other transplants found the team. When the white-flighters returned from the ‘burbs to revisit the team and the city they’d forsaken when both needed them most. When the Superstation brought the beauty of Wrigley Field to the farm fields of Central Illinois and Iowa and Indiana and Nebraska and Colorado before there was a team in Denver. After one winning season brought the Cubs national attention and TV and movie stars made being a Cub fan cool. That’s when this owner found the Cubs, when the bandwagon was already crowded. After the other yuppies had jumped on board with the out-of-towners. In the time when the blue collar Cub fans were being pushed out with the old ladies and the kids to make room for pink polo collared men with mobile phones and feathered hair, their siliconed lady friends, and the frat boys with their sorority girls. When that so very non-Chicago accent could be heard declaring into cell phones across the park, “Oh my gawd, guess where I am … Wreglay.”

He came with them.

When they took over the park and the neighborhood. When the suburban raised children of the white-flighters demanded their first grown-up apartment be in ‘Wreglayville’. Post-skyboxes, post-bleacher expansion, post-box seat expansion, post-rooftop monetizing.

He is one of them.

It’s no surprise he would be at the helm when Old Style beer is booted from the park and a Jumbo-tron is to rise above it.

He is one of them.

The outsiders who make me feel I have a better connection with those others from the numbered streets wearing black and white than I do with those adorning red, white, and Cubbie blue.

I think he is their leader.

“I want to be able to see replays,” they cry.

“Then stay home,” I answer.

“It’s the only way we can have a World Series,” they demand.

“Bullshit!” I reply.

“Any other owner would do the same thing,” some lament.

“That doesn’t make it right,” I declare.

“They have to move into the twenty-first century,” they assert.

“What does that have to do with a Jumbo-Tron?” I ask.

What we generically call jumbotrons today have been a part of baseball since 1980. Wrigley Field is the only professional sports arena to not have one. You can either view that as a child would, “everyone else has one why not us?” or as a person of intelligence and forethought who realizes that that is what makes the place so special. That is what you’ve been marketing when the team is bad.

The last time Wrigley was the ‘only one without’ was during the 1980’s fight over lights. That issue affected not only the Cubs, but all of baseball and the networks that covered them. The team couldn’t avoid installing lights any longer. The jumbotron affects only them, and with the proper business acumen, it wouldn’t be an issue. It is the easy way out. A child’s perception and solution.

And so it has come to pass. The view from the grandstands of the old girl will be forever changed, and with it, so will the notion of what it is to be a Cub fan. What I grew up with will breathe its last breath tomorrow and then silently slip into the past. In 2015, when fans ascend the stairs and transition from shadow to light, they’ll not be overcome by the natural colors of blue sky, green grass and red brick, but rather by the flashing LED colors of a two-story television screen, and odds are, a still mediocre team on the field.

My prediction for the future of Cubs baseball is that they will finally win a World Series Championship when I no longer care.

Rest in peace old girl and thank you for the memories.

Me as Pirates batboy 1986 with Tony Pena

The old Bleachers

Bob Denier chasing a fly ball. No lights, no skyboxes, no ugly press box in the upper deck.